


Forgetting Peter

by oddishly



Category: Peter Pan - J. M. Barrie
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 13:34:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1094464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oddishly/pseuds/oddishly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>But the fairy did not fly to Peter; it got up and walked across the beach. That was when Peter realised it was not a fairy but a little girl, with blonde plaits and a blue sundress and a very upturned nose. </p><p>"How do you do," she said, with perfectly lovely intonation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forgetting Peter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lc2l](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lc2l/gifts).



Peter wished he could leave, once.

It was one of those days in June, right in the middle of Spring and the first day you have to wear sun lotion. There are no months in Neverland, except for when it's Christmas, but sometimes you wake up and you know it's June, and so it was then. Peter opened his eyes and shook himself out of the hammock. 

The hammock was a very nice one made of spider's webs. I expect it's still there now, strung up at just the right height between two palm trees on the beach, ready for you to take an afternoon nap. The coconuts always fall at the feet end, and usually just within reach of a rock to crack them open when you get thirsty. And at night the hammock gets washed away with the tide, but then the spiders come back in the morning and hurtle between the trees, and then it's back again just in time by lunch. 

Well, the hammock was Peter's, and no one else dared to sleep in it but he, for the little wretch _would_ wait until you were drifting off with nothing but sugarplums in your head before he flew up from underneath and tipped you out. Captain, who wasn't a Captain at all but a stowaway, and the three girls (except for the oldest one, who was sometimes a boy) who lived in Neverland at the moment, and the mermaid who lost her tail in wager, all found themselves lined up like sardines on the sand anytime they tried to beat him at the game. They were all off having a thrilling battle with the real pirates, or at least until teatime, and that's why they missed it all.

You will remember, of course, that Peter knew fairies. Well, the fairies liked to play tricks on Peter, and this morning the one who most particularly liked to had been hiding in a shell just underneath him in the hammock, and when he fell, he fell on her. Oh! If you could have seen her. For a fairy's wings are very fine, much too fine for us to see, and they will fit through most gaps if you bend and twist and shape them enough. When Peter fell he pushed the shell right down on top of her, until her wings came poking through all the gaps that the sea-salt had made in it, but she couldn't get them back out because now they were crooked.

Peter, the beast, at first laughed. She was so pitiful, flat in the dirt with her legs and arms splayed out like a starfish, and her face was a picture. 

But the fairy kept on crying, and after a while Peter got tired of laughing at her and felt that he should do something, if just to stop the noise. He didn't know how to fix a fairy, though, which I think is reasonable. I wouldn't know how to fix a fairy, either. So instead he sat cross-legged in the sand and watched her cry more, but this time he didn't laugh.

After a while the sun became ashamed of Peter and ducked behind a cloud, and that was when he looked up and saw another fairy on the other side of the beach. "I shall ask her!" he said to himself, thinking that she would know what to do, and shouted at the top of his lungs, "Fairy, come here!"

But the fairy did not fly to Peter; it got up and walked across the beach. That was when Peter realised it was not a fairy but a little girl, with blonde plaits and a blue sundress and a very upturned nose. 

"How do you do," she said, with perfectly lovely intonation.

"How do _you_ do," Peter replied, and turned his cheek toward her. He couldn't remember anymore when he had started doing that, or why, but sometimes little boys or girls gave him thimbles, so he kept on and no one was any of the worse for it.

This little girl did not give him a thimble. Indeed, she was much too little to reach his cheek. She would look ten years old to you or me, but she was only as tall as Peter's left knee, until he shook his leg out a bit, and then she was as tall as both knees.

"How did you get here?" asked Peter. She was quite the first child he had ever met in the Neverland, instead of in the nursery.

"The same way as you did, I expect," she answered promptly. "How did you get here?"

"I flew," said Peter, and showed her. "Like this!"

"I see," she said. "That's not the same as me, then, but that doesn't matter." She looked him up and down. That is quite an impressive feat for someone so small as she, and I don't think I could have managed it. "You're a very little boy, you know."

"Yes," said Peter. "And you are a very little girl." He flew even higher, so she would be even smaller. 

"I expect I am the first little girl you have ever met. Am I?"

Peter thought her very stupid. The first! Peter had lost count of how many little girls he had ever met and did not remember the first. 

He crowed at the palm trees. But they were cross with him for pulling off their fronds, and did not giggle at how witty he was. So he was forced to tell her that he thought her stupid.

"That's very rude of you to say," she replied. She flicked her pigtails over her shoulders, the way that her older sister or cousin might have done. "You should say, _how interesting_ , and ask if I would like some tea, and keep your tongue to yourself. Would you like some cake?"

And she held out some cake in her hand.

Peter took it. He stuffed it into his mouth at once, and tasted all sorts of lovely things like chocolate and rose candy and what every other child would have been able to tell him is a Werther's Original, and that you have one every time you go to your grandma's house on Saturday plus another two that you sneak from her handbag, but which to Peter just delicious. And he was, after all, very hungry.

"Do you meet many little girls?" said this particular little girl. "Was there one here very long ago?" She had waited for Peter to finish eating his cake, which is quite the best example of perfect manners that I have ever seen.

"Yes," said Peter. He was sure of that.

"What was her name?" said Alice. Let us call her Alice. No reason. "Was it Jane? Or Lindsey?"

"No," said Peter doubtfully.

"Or Rachel, or Lucy-Anne, or Mary?" continued Alice. "You must remember her name, surely."

"I don't know," he said. "I think maybe she didn't have one." But now he wasn't sure at all.

Alice said, "Of course she must have a name. Just as my name is Alice," for of course that was she, "and my cat's name is Dinah and my mother's is Mother. What if she was called Alice as well?" and then she had to stop for a while and think about how strange that would be. 

"Mother," said Peter, "I think that might have been it."

"Of course it wasn't," said Alice. Peter decided she must be very imperious, and also that he didn't like her. "Oh, how terribly sad that you don't remember! How can you not remember!"

"Very easily," said Peter. "I meet all the children who come to play here. They stay with me, but I'm the only one who stays." That is true. And we all know that he was very proud of that. He crowed at the clouds on their way by, and felt a bit better. 

"How very odd," said Alice sadly.

It was then that she noticed the fairy in her shell. The fairy had got bored of the two children long before, and had thought she might leave, but remembered only as she tried to wish herself into the air that now she had a very big, very ugly house attached to her, and she might never fly again. 

So instead she had fallen asleep, and her light had dimmed to a pretty green glow that looked like nothing more than dapple, which was why the children had forgotten her.

"Oh, her," said Peter, when Alice exclaimed. "Why, I just came along and found her like this."

He did not think Alice would be pleased if she knew what he had really done, and he was very pleased with himself for remembering to lie.

"What are you going to do with her?"

"Why," said Peter – "Why, I shall take her to see a Princess. Come with me!"

 

 

Across the other side of the island, a long way over the cormorant cliffs, past all the letters which came to mark the spot in Neverland and forgot to tell the X they were leaving, and ignoring the rope ladder, you know the one, are all the stories Peter has ever brought back. There are knights and dragons and seamstresses and geese, and girls whose hair curls down to their knees and tinkers and boys who turn into roses on the full moon and when it rains. You haven't heard of any of them, because every time Peter hears a story on your street, or the street that the Robinses live on, or the one you avoid when you're walking home from school behind the Patterson family, he brings the story back to Neverland, and hides it in a corner there where no one else can find it. That is the dark part of Neverland. We all know that stories are meant to be told, and they grow lonely and cruel when they are not, which is why Peter is scared to visit them.

But he didn't have anyone else to ask how to fix the fairy, and he wanted to impress Alice, so he told her this would be just the thing.

Well Alice set the fairy inside her sewing basket, which she had hung from a branch for the time being. That sounds very pretty and cradle-like, and it was, but it meant that you had to see Alice tip her wools and knitting needles and embroidery onto the beach like nothing, and if her mother had been there she would have been horrified.

And they set off the other side of the island, the darker side, where the children who are only visiting don't go or don't remember. You won't know this yet, but when in a year or two you find yourself awake at gone 3 in the morning, when it's still dark and cool outside and the rain on the window has stopped and all is deathly still, that is what you are trying to forget. Dear Alice had seen many worse things and swung the basket merrily at her side, but as they approached, Peter began to remember why he never came here, and was afraid.

All was fine until, reaching nearly the highest peak of the last mountain before the shadows, something caught Alice's eye.

"Who's there?" she called, and Peter trembled beside her.

"What is it," he whispered, and tried to grasp her hand. "What have you seen – "

Alice didn't notice. "Oh!" she cried, and she set her sewing basket down neatly on the ground. "White Rabbit!"

The White Rabbit looked over its shoulder at her. It was quite nearly the size of Alice, but she showed no fear, and leapt down the rabbit hole and away. It never came back to Neverland after that, and Alice soon forgot she had ever been.

And now Peter was very scared, and all alone. The fairy in its shell wasn't making any noise anymore. 

"Come in," shrilled one of the roses climbing down the cliff. The Princes gestured at Peter, and over there was a Princess whose hands and teeth were bloodied, and the lake was black and full of creatures that Peter was too afraid to look at. So instead he looked at the rabbit hole, where it had been, and could not see it, nor Alice.

Peter had never thought before of what he had lost. He didn't recognise the feeling but he knew it did not feel nice. 

So he looked at the fairy in her basket and he thought and, "No," he said, "I think maybe I won't."


End file.
